White, Morton - Normative Ethics, Normative Epistemology, And Quine's Holism

02/02/2007

The Philosophy of WV Quine, Hehn & Schlipp eds, 1986

Terribly written paper. Addressed toward Quine, but not exactly-- trying to convince him of something-- but clunky.

Author's main point is that if Quine allows for normative epistemology, he should also allow for normative ethics.

Author tries to incorporate a positive account of ethics and fit it into Quine's holism. Quine's holism includes the following: if a set of theory and observation sentences lead to an expectation for observation A and you get observation not-A (recalcitrant data), it is open about which sentence to revise/scrap. This employed just scientific theories and observation sentences. Author wants to add another dimension: feelings. A scientist can get a recalcitrant feeling about accepting a hypothesis-- even if the evidence is for it. This she should adjust, since if she didn't, she wouldn't be following a normative epistemology to adjust belief to evidence and theory. But if we add 'feelings', then a moral agent needs to adjust her normative beliefs, or the facts in the situation in order to avoid a recalcitrant feeling.

Quine replies to White after the paper, saying that observation sentences should command nearly universal acceptance if true, whereas sentences of moral evaluation will not, since they depend on a lot of outside information that not all the witnesses will have.